Tuesday, March 2, 2010

I don't know about you but I would say but kids aren't allowed to be kids anymore. They can't play like the way I did when I was growing up. Children today are being coddled too much. In some communities street hockey, hopscotch, kids riding bikes on sidewalks are not allowed. They have to wear helmets for what seems like everything now etc. The playground equipment is geared for the safety of the kids but doesn't look like much fun.

The playground equipment that we had when I was growing up in the '60's would be classified way too dangerous today, but we had fun. I don't remember anyone where I lived get an injury anything more serious than a broken arm. Nobody died. We all survived.

My husband told me back when he was a kid in England, he and a bunch of friends would go to an area that used be a landfill. It was a swampy area where there was still some garbage around and of course rats would be hanging around. Hubby said that he and his friends played Robin Hood and Tarzan and had a whale of a time. No one got hurt. No one got sick. Parents didn't panic.

Let kids be kids. Let them have fun exploring and being creative. They'll end up all the better for it.

Today's National Post has a great article on how our children are coddled today.

50 reasons to let children experience a little danger

"It really started as a snowball of observations that my friends' children were not having the kind of childhood that I did or even they did," says Gever Tulley, the California-based author of 50 Dangerous Things. "It got me thinking about how we become competent and where in the last 30 years we changed our definition of what kids are capable of."

The book's title is "deliberately provocative," he says, and it is meant as both a guidebook for fretful parents who want to loosen up and a "call to action for over-protected children," with instructions on safe ways to experiment with dangerous things.

"We create a false impression in our minds that children are in peril all the time and everywhere, when in fact, according to the most recent studies, this is the safest time in history for children," he said. "There couldn't be a better time to be running around outside playing."

HOW TO LIVE AND LEARN

Some of the 50 Dangerous Things author Gever Tulley says we should let our children do: